NEW Labour’s early Cabinet discussions on devolution will stay secret for at least another seven years “in the public interest”, Justice Secretary Jack Straw said last night.

NEW Labour’s early Cabinet discussions on devolution will stay secret for at least another seven years “in the public interest”, Justice Secretary Jack Straw said last night.

Mr Straw has attracted anger by wielding a ministerial veto to block publication of the papers, which detail Cabinet debates on creating the Assembly and Scottish Parliament in 1997.

It is only the second time Mr Straw has used his veto over the Freedom of Information Act, having previously only intervened over Cabinet minutes relating to the Iraq war.

But he defended the decision yesterday, saying he needed to protect the “fundamental” principle of collective Cabinet responsibility.

In a wide-ranging interview, he also told the Western Mail:

A new prison will be built in North Wales if a suitable site can be found;

he would have allowed the introduction of bilingual juries if it could have been done “in a fair way”.

he never discussed the possibility of ousting Gordon Brown with Geoff Hoon in the failed January coup.

Asked about the Freedom of Information exemption, Mr Straw said: “The Freedom of Information Act provides exemptions, both to allow space for ministers to debate issues, and to protect the concept of collective responsibility.

“Collective responsibility is not an idle notion; it’s fundamental to the running of government – actually the running of most organisations, perhaps including newspapers – that you can have an argument, but you then agree at the end of it that the decision, however arrived at, is abided by.

“My judgement, which I shared with members of the Cabinet as I’m required to do so, was that it would not, long term, be in the public interest to release the documents at this stage.”

A recent change to the Public Records Act means Government documents will routinely be made public after 20 years instead of the traditional 30, so the devolution papers will be released in any case in 2017.

Mr Straw added: “The Freedom of Information Act is not an à la carte menu, it’s a single whole and section 53 [the exemption clause] is a fundamental part of the architecture.

“The surprise is that it has been used so infrequently – the Act has been in force now for five years, and it has been used twice.”

The Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham said in his official report on the case that he was “perturbed” by the use of the veto, and some of those involved in the Cabinet discussions at the time – including then-Welsh Secretary Ron Davies – have suggested there is little of contention in the records.

The documents relate to meetings of the Cabinet’s Committee on Devolution to Scotland, Wales and the English Regions, set up within days of Labour’s election victory in 1997.

The group was chaired by then-Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine, and included Cabinet big-hitters John Prescott and Mr Straw himself, who was then Home Secretary.

Rows are known to have blown up over how much power should be given to Cardiff Bay, the way the new institutions should be funded and how much tax-raising power should be given to the Scottish Parliament.

Mr Straw also said he had been “surprised” when a deal to build a prison on the former Friction Dynamex site in Caernarfon fell through last year amid wrangling over costs.

There is no prison in North Wales, despite years of campaigning by local MPs, and Mr Straw said the Government remained committed to finding a location to build one.

He said: “We are in the market, literally in the market for a site and want to see a prison in North Wales. We’re changing and improving the way in which sites are identified, because my judgement is that the old system, where sites were searched for confidentially, has ended up exciting public mistrust, and it’s better to be completely open about this.”

He had also looked “long at hard” at the idea of introducing bilingual juries for some criminal trials in Wales, he said, but concluded there was no way of doing so fairly.

“In a situation where, in Wales, you have some people who are bilingual but some people who are not – if you had a rule that a defendant could request a bilingual jury, this would undermine the principle that juries are randomly selected,” said Mr Straw.

“If I thought it was going to be possible to do it in a fair way, I would have done it.”

He said he felt there was “no demand” for the devolution of criminal justice powers to the Assembly Government, saying the legal systems of Wales and England had been “conceptually the same” for centuries.

As one of only three politicians to have served in every Cabinet since 1997 – Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are the others – Mr Straw was seen to be a pivotal figure during Mr Brown’s battles to see off attempts by some Labour MPs to lever him out of Downing Street.

Mr Straw said he had not discussed a coup attempt with his friend Geoff Hoon, who launched a failed bid to oust the Prime Minister in January.

“Geoff never said a single word to me about the ‘coup’ that he and Patricia Hewitt launched to an astonished PLP,” said Mr Straw.

“In the period between the Crewe by-election [April 2008] and the Glasgow East by-election [June 2008], there was a lot of conversation between people, but those were to do with being in a difficult situation, not to do with planning a coup.”

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